Organizations, such as retail, manufacturing, finance and healthcare businesses use Remote-office and Branch-office (ROBO) sites for various applications. For example, using ROBO sites, retail businesses can sell goods at stores, banks can distribute money, manufacturers can build goods in manufacturing sites and hospitals can serve patients.
However, ROBO sites typically lack local Information Technology (IT) staff, which makes data protection and recovery in remote sites hard to achieve. A two-node virtual storage area network (SAN) cluster with one witness node remotely in the headquarter of ROBO sites allows the ROBO sites to have High Availability (HA), data protection and recovery capabilities. The witness node is used to ensure that more than 50% of the components of an object remain available during a network partition or an object failure. However, in a two-node virtual SAN cluster with 1 witness node, each ROBO site needs one physical or virtual witness host, resulting in a large number of physical/virtual witness hosts when the number of their ROBO sites becomes large. For example, if a user has couple hundred ROBO sites, it would require a corresponding number (e.g., couple hundred) of physical/virtual witness hosts. If the user chooses to deploy physical witness hosts, the user needs to purchase hundreds of physical hosts and find an appropriate location to house the physical hosts, an adequate amount power to serve the physical hosts and a proper cooling system for the physical hosts. Alternatively, if the user chooses to deploy virtual witness hosts, the user needs to manage a large number of virtual witness hosts.